On Stage

...To call this the ne plus ultra of theatrical bankruptcy would be rash in these parlous days...

...The gimmick, too, is the same as in Plaza Suite: four different sets of people staying, at various times, in the same suite of a hotel, in this case the Beverly Hills...

...Jack Weston is an accomplished farceur, and he and the inventive director, Gene Saks (himself a very funny sometime comedian), have devised some grand maneuvers—inspired mugging and eloquent sight gags—to keep Simon's single joke hopping...

...how is hubby to hide that blotto hooker in his bed from her...

...as a hoydenish Chicago wife, she is yet again a carbon copy of her two previous roles, proving disastrously that a one-stringed instrument is unfit for a three-part invention...

...The mother, a high-powered Newsweek political columnist, is trying to reclaim the girl, who has run away from her in New York to join her father, a former New York writer now a Hollywood scenarist...

...That Something's Afoot should have gotten even a handful of good reviews from supposedly respectable reviewers is the only real mystery about this pseudo-Agatha Christie mystery thriller—a kind of witless Ten Little Indians—set to appalling music and lyrics that are actually on the sub-rhyming-dictionary level...

...For, alas, the more Simon tries to stretch his purview, the more his craft shrinks on him...

...Grizzard and Barrie try hard, but haven't enough to work with and may not even be suited to such low farce...

...Yet there is no more to this than a vaudeville sketch unconscionably dragged out, something that no self-respecting vaudeville sketch would allow...

...Still, in an era that offers such fare, maybe a shade less skillfully, from both large and little screens, the stage might be expected to come up with something more enterprising—say, a little social content to make the customers sit up and take stock of themselves...

...It is interesting to speculate that just as American show-biz humor has been shaped predominantly by the Jewish minority (which, in show business, is far from a minority), so many of our actresses have been turned into "fag hags" for a Broadway audience infiltrated by a minority taste whose hostility to women takes the form of wanting them desexualized...

...Though Tammy Grimes now plays a high-powered English stage and screen star, she sounds and behaves almost exactly as she did when she was the Newsweek columnist...

...A counterpart to Plaza Suite, it is likewise made up of four playlets that extend from the farcical through the comical to the supposedly poignant, although the mix is slightly different: Here we move from a humorous yet also purportedly heart-tugging item to an outright piece of farce and, after the intermission, the pattern is repeated...

...and after the event, upon returning from a long drunken night meant to console the actress for not winning...

...if that is the case, he is perhaps wise not to try...

...On Stage suite" for brash instruments BY JOHN SIMON Having moved to Los Angeles for reasons he did not make entirely clear—but presumably on the supposition that in the country of the blind the one-eyed is king?Neil Simon has now produced his first West-Coast play, California Suite...

...The targets are mostly New York and Los Angeles and their respective life-styles, as well as the ex-spouses' current lovers and, to a lesser extent, the (unseen) daughter and her teen-ager's frivolities...

...a slip on a banana peel, I am sure, would have been greeted with a frenzy befitting the Second Coming...

...Two nastily programmed computers could battle it out just as well, and elicit just as much involvement from us...

...It is too bad that he apparently cannot manage even a semblance of a British accent...

...So here we have the firstling of Neil Simon's beaches-and-orange-juice phase...

...Simon pulls all the stops on his pathos organ, which meshes poorly with the foregoing farcicalness, especially since his repertoire is rather more limited in heart tugs than in side-splitters...

...After a while, one gets bored, and one's attention unhappily wanders to the actress' general unfemininity, carefully cultivated over the years...

...As the first befuddled, then incensed, wife, Barbara Barrie contributes graceful comic acting that maintains a basic human dignity...

...The second playlet, Visitors from Philadelphia, has a formerly faithful, aging and spreading Jewish businessman waking up late after a binge to find himself in bed with a hooker who cannot be roused from a monstrous drunken slumber...

...And the favored alternative to this Tammy Grimes type is the Julie Harris type: infantile-sentimental, and equally lacking in womanliness...

...The first playlet, Visitor from New York, concerns divorced parents sparring over their teen-age daughter...

...Grizzard, however, is much better here, making the husband touching but not pitiful...

...The couple clamber into bed, and the wife begs her husband to keep his eyes open and fixed on her for once, even as he tries, as best he can, to please her...

...But, for all the dazzlement, I found myself not really laughing...

...And her face is a mask of smugness from which the dialogue issues slowly, very slowly, as if a knife point were not only stuck into the other person, but also lovingly twisted in the wound...

...The Broadway version, directed by Tony Tanner, an unfunny British comedian, has a suitably desperate aspect: scenery, costumes and cast all look like something picked up at a charity bazaar...

...Thus one lyric contains a long, dull string of rhymes consisting of participles ending in -ating, followed closely by an equally dreary and lengthy participial parade rhyming on -ated...

...We come now to Visitors from London...

...The mere word "fuzzy-wuzzies" had this lumpen audience in stitches...

...but that it has every right to compete for the title is undeniable...

...There is a steadily decreasing supply of virility in his characterizations these days, and although he reads his lines intelligently enough, one cannot help wondering whether the play's marriage foundered on excessive reversal of sexual roles—clearly not what was intended...

...Once again, Jack Weston is in his element...

...This is intended as knockabout farce, full of hilarious pratfalls and the like...

...The ex-spouses have at each other: she with consummately bitchy aggressiveness, he with a kind of weary, defensive cynicism that would just as soon turn conciliatory, if only she would let him...

...The joint work of James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach, all actors in regional theaters and unknown to me, Something's Afoot has been footing it across the hinterlands and Canada in several productions for a couple of years now...

...but it is nowhere up to the work of the masters of the genre, say, Georges Feydeau...

...This quality of being an angular wind-up doll for the delivery of cutie-pie nastinesses is one that a good many American actresses have developed for the delectation, apparently, of largely homosexual audiences...

...George Grizzard, as the ex-husband whose hair has become blonder even as his cashmere sweaters became more pastel pink, is another performer who has not matured well...

...The anti-California and anti-New York jokes, though fairly obvious, are quite funny, and have the further advantage of selling the play on both coasts...

...Even so, California Suite is a work of near-genius compared to a ghastly little musical that seems to be making it on Broadway despite very mixed notices...

...it proves not very different from the yield of his bagels-and-lox period...

...There is something depressing about an entire one-acter made up of insult repartee, almost all of it one-liners, relentlessly similar in their brand of cleverness...

...This playlet is in two parts: before the ceremony, when the wife is mostly fussing with a gown she claims makes her look humpbacked and the husband amicably teases her...

...The fourth one-acter, Visitors from Chicago, is about two married couples who have been traveling together on a joint vacation and have reached a stage of virulent mutual antipathy...

...pretty soon the quartet are at one another pell-mell, as mental and physical damages are deliberately inflicted or accidentally incurred all around...

...Tammy Grimes is the most mannered of actresses, having evolved a standard delivery midway between a cute, baby-doll drawl and a severely uninflected, punitive monotone...

...there is very little humanity here, and no respite at all...

...Yet only in the opener are the one-liners crackling away in the grand Simon tradition, and this, indeed, is the single piece that nearly works...

...Crapulous banter now yields to recriminations as she nags her husband for not fully satisfying her sexually...

...An acrimonious game of tennis has left one wife with a sprained ankle...

...Tammy Grimes is hopeless...

...Simon's one-liners sparkle with unusual consistency, and there is even a modicum of characterization here: the woman's hostility blazing away, while the man's fire is banked, though sometimes just as searing...

...Her accent, too, is halfway between fake British and genuine East Boston...

...California Suite may well prove a crowd-pleaser all the same, and is certainly the work of someone who knows what commercial comedy is about...

...What was interesting, though, was the boundless enthusiasm of a weekend audience comprising in equal parts tourists and the seedier strata of New York pleasure-seekers...

...A preposterous premise, this, serving as the basis for a tiresomely one-gag farce: The wife, whom hubby failed to meet at the airport, shows up tired and dying to take a nap...

...It is, in fact, rather less amusing than his current movie, Murder by Death, in which he sticks to what he knows best...

...A major British actress up for the Academy Award has arrived for Oscar night with her bisexual husband, a minor actor turned dealer in antiques...

...The acting does not help much...